The Kingdom in the Sun (57 page)

To give him his due, William had inherited all his grandfather's resilience. He does not seem to have been particularly cast down by the disaster, and showed it by sending, for the next few summers,

¹
Another Arab historian, al-Maqrisi, claims that a Sicilian fleet had already been sent to the Levant in
11
69,
to assist in the Frankish siege of Damietta. But no other source confirms this, and extracts from one of Saladin's letters quoted by Abu-Shama strongly imply that no Sicilian ships were present on that occasion.

annual
raiding parties to harry the Egyptian coast. But none of these operations was of any real political importance; in the Crusader states of the Levant they passed virtually unnoticed. And they certainly did not obscure the plain fact that William II's first foreign adventure had ended in catastrophe.

The murder of Thomas Becket, deeply as it had shocked all Christian consciences, had no lasting effect on Anglo-Papal relations. At Avranches on
21
May
1172,
having performed a public penance and given various promises for the future—some of which he actually kept—Henry II received his absolution; thenceforth, with his abrasive archbishop no longer there to complicate matters, his reconciliation with the Pope was complete. Where Alexander led, the states of Europe were quick to follow; and it was not long before Henry found his diplomatic position stronger than at any time in the previous decade.

William of Sicily, having attained his majority, was among the first of his fellow-rulers to re-establish contact, and for the next few years the two Kings maintained a cordial if rather spasmodic correspondence. Curiously, however, neither seems to have liked to resurrect the marriage proposal—not even after the Byzantine fiasco of
1172,
when William was once more on the lookout for a wife. When at last the idea was raised again, it came not from William or Henry but from a more august source than either—Pope Alexander himself.

For Alexander was growing uneasy. Sicily was still his most important ally against Frederick Barbarossa, and it was vital for him that this alliance should be maintained. An ill-advised marriage, however, could destroy it overnight. There had already been one bad moment in
1173
when Barbarossa, to everyone's surprise, had offered William one of his own daughters—a proposal which, if accepted, would have delivered up all South Italy to imperial control and left the Papacy surrounded. Fortunately the King had turned it down; but the very thought of such an eventuality and its consequences had been enough to stir the Pope to action. The Sicilian marriage, he had decided, was too important to be left to chance. He himself would have to intervene.

The alacrity with which both Kings responded to Alexander's new overtures makes it even more surprising that they had not reopened the discussions on their own initiative; and early in
1176
three specially accredited Sicilian ambassadors, the Bishops-Elect of Troia and Capaccio and the Royal Justiciar Florian of Camerota, left Palermo to make a formal request on behalf of their sovereign for Joanna's hand. On their way they were joined by Archbishop Rothrud of Rouen, and at Whitsuntide they presented themselves before the King in London. Henry received them warmly. Although for form's sake he had to summon a council of prelates and nobles to consider the question, their unanimous agreement was a foregone conclusion. But before the betrothal could be announced there remained one further—and potentially embarrassing—preliminary; William had sensibly stipulated that he would enter into no formal commitment without some assurance as to the physical attractions of his bride. The ambassadors therefore proceeded to Winchester, where Joanna was living with her mother Eleanor—held captive by the King since her involvement in her sons' rebellion three years before—'to see', in the words of a contemporary chronicler,
¹
'whether she would be pleasing to them'. Fortunately, she was. 'When they looked upon her beauty,' he continues, 'they were delighted beyond measure.' Back to Palermo hurried the Bishop of Troia with an English embassy led by John, Bishop of Norwich, bearing letters signifying the King's consent to the match; his colleagues meanwhile stayed in England until Joanna should be ready to leave.

Though she was still only ten years old, Henry was determined that his daughter should travel in a state appropriate to her rank and the occasion. To the Bishop of Winchester he entrusted the task of engaging a suitable household and preparing her wardrobe, while he himself ordered seven ships to be made ready to carry the party safely across the Channel. In mid-August he held a special court at Winchester where he showered the Sicilian ambassadors with presents of gold and silver, clothes, cups and horses, and formally surrendered

¹
Roger of Hoveden, whose authorship of the
Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi—
formerly known by the name of Abbot Benedict of Peterborough—has now been established by Lady Stenton
{English Historical Review,
October 1953.)

Joanna to their care. Then, accompanied also
by
her uncle, Henry's natural brother Hameline Plantagenet, the Archbishops of Canterbury and Rouen and the Bishop of Evreux, the little princess rode off to Southampton and, on
26
August, set sail for Normandy. Her passage through France was smooth; her eldest brother Henry escorted her as far as Poitiers, where her second brother Richard took over, conducting her safely through his own Duchy of Aquitaine and the tributary County of Toulouse to the port of
St
Gilles.

At St Gilles Joanna was greeted in King William's name
by
Richard Palmer and the Archbishop of Capua. Twenty-five of the King's ships were waiting in the harbour; henceforth the princess's safety was in Sicilian hands. But it was the second week in November, and the winter gales had begun in earnest. The news may already have reached the party that, not long before, two other vessels escorting the Bishop of Norwich back from Messina had foundered, with the loss of all the presents William was sending to his prospective father-in-law; in any event
it
was decided not to risk the open sea at such a time, but to sail along the coast, keeping as close inshore as possible. Even this journey seems to have been uncomfortable enough; six weeks later the fleet was still no further than Naples, and poor Joanna was suffering so severely from sea-sickness that it was decided to remain there over Christmas, giving her a chance to recover her strength—and, perhaps, her looks. She would then complete the journey overland.

Early in the New Year the party was off again, following the coast road through Campania and Calabria, then across the straits to Messina and on to Cefalù; at last, on the night of 2 February
1177,
they reached Palermo. William was waiting at the gates to welcome his bride. She was mounted on one of his royal palfreys, and escorted by her husband-to-be to the palace which had been prepared for herself and her household—probably the Zisa—through streets so brightly illuminated that, in the words of the same chronicler, 'it might have been thought that the city itself was on fire, and the stars in the heavens could scarcely be seen for the brilliance of the lights'. Eleven days later, on St Valentine's Eve, they were married and garlanded with flowers; and immediately afterwards Joanna, her long hair flowing down over her shoulders, knelt in the Palatine Chapel before her countryman Walter of the Mill, now Archbishop of Palermo, as he anointed and crowned her Queen of Sicily.

At
the time of her coronation, the young Queen was barely eleven, her husband twenty-three. Yet despite the difference in ages the marriage was, so far as we can tell, an ideally happy one. There was no language problem; Joanna, born in France and educated largely at the abbey of Fontevrault, was by her upbringing far more French than English, and Norman French was still the everyday language of the Sicilian court. Her new subjects, too, took her to their hearts and seemed to identify her, as they had her husband, with those radiant, tranquil years when the Kingdom, finally at peace with the world and with itself, prospered and was happy.

They were quite right to do so; for within a few months of the marriage there occurred in Venice an event which was to put an end to hostilities between William and his most formidable adversary for the rest of the latter's life. On 29 May of the previous year, at Legnano just outside Milan, Frederick Barbarossa had suffered at the hands of the Lombard League the most crushing defeat of his career; and while the Milanese had celebrated their triumph by carving a series of suitable bas-reliefs on the Porta Romana,
¹
imperial ambassadors had sought out Pope Alexander at Anagni, negotiating the terms of a treaty that would bring an end to the seventeen-year schism and peace to Italy. At last the broad outlines of the agreement emerged; and it was duly arranged to hold, in July
11
77, a great conference in Venice—to be attended by the Pope, representatives of both the League and the King of Sicily, and ultimately, when all their deliberations were concluded, by the Emperor himself.

The two envoys chosen
by
William were Count Roger of Andria and—fortunately for posterity—Archbishop Romuald of Salerno, who has left us a remarkably detailed account (for him) of all that took place. On the morning of 24 July, he reports, the Pope went early

¹
Or fairly suitable. In his book
Italian Sculptors,
quoted by Augustus Hare, C. C. Perkins refers to two carved portraits of Frederick and his Empress, 'one of which is a hideous caricature, the other too grossly obscene for description'. The Porta Romana was demolished in the eighteenth century; but what is left of it—including Frederick's bas-relief—has been incorporated in a reconstruction now to be seen in the Castello museum.

to St Mark's and despatched a delegation of cardinals to the Lido, where, at the church of St Nicholas, Frederick was waiting. There the Emperor solemnly abjured his anti-Pope and made formal acknowledgement of Alexander as rightful pontiff, while the cardinals in return lifted his long excommunication. Now at last he could be admitted to the Republic, to which he was escorted with great pomp by the Doge in person, the Patriarch of Venice and the cardinals. Landing at the Piazzetta, he proceeded on foot between the two high masts from which flew the banners of St Mark, to the front of the great basilica where Alexander, enthroned and in full pontificals, waited to receive him. Romuald goes on:

As he approached the Pope, he was touched by the Holy Spirit; venerating God in Alexander, he flung aside his imperial mantle and prostrated himself at full length on the ground before him. But the Pope, with tears in his eyes, gently raised him up, kissed him and gave him his blessing, while the assembled Germans lifted up their voices in a
Te Deum.
Then, taking him by the right hand, the Pope led him into the church for a further benediction, after which the Emperor retired with his following to the Doge's Palace.
¹

The treaty of Venice marks the culmination of Alexander's pontificate. After all the sufferings and humiliations he had had to endure, through eighteen years of schism and ten of exile, and in the face of the unremitting hostility of one of the most redoubtable figures ever to wear the imperial crown, here at last was his reward. By now well over seventy, he had lived to see the Emperor's recognition not only of himself as legitimate Pope but of all the temporal rights of the Papacy over the city of Rome—those same rights that Frederick had so arrogantly claimed for the Empire at the time of his coronation. The fifteen-year peace that Barbarossa had signed with Sicily meant the end of those fears of imperial encirclement that had in the past

¹
Plate 19. In the atrium of St Mark's, immediately in front of the central doorway, a small lozenge of red and white marble still indicates the place of the Emperor's abasement. 'The Venetian legends say that the Emperor, facing Alexander on this very spot, agreed to apologise to St Peter but not to the Pope, and that Alexander replied sternly: "To Peter
and
the Pope." '(James Morris,
Venice.)
It is a nice story, but it hardly accords with Romuald's version; and Romuald, as a highly-placed eyewitness, should have known.